But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is best in his poetry is this expression of frustrated hope. He has indeed, when he is moved simply by public passion, some wonderful trumpet-notes; what hate and indignation can do, he sometimes does. And his rapturous dreams of freedom can stir the intellect, if not the blood. But it must be remarked that poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm is liable to one fatal weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric. To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest, sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner. They appear now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of one another; the task of unravelling their genealogy would be as difficult as it is pointless. If Shelley had been merely the singer of revolution, the intensity and sincerity of his feeling would still have made him a better poet than Byron; but he would not have been a great poet, partly because of the inherent drawbacks of the subject, partly because of his strained and false view of "the moral universe" and of himself. His song, in treating of men as citizens, as governors and governed, could never have touched such a height as Burns' "A man's a man for a' that." Fortunately for our literature, Shelley did more than arraign tyrants. The Romantic Movement was not merely a new way of considering human beings in their public capacity; it meant also a new kind of sensitiveness to their environment. If we turn, say, from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock' to Wordsworth's 'The Prelude', it is as if we have passed from a saloon crowded with a bewigged and painted company, wittily conversing in an atmosphere that has become rather stuffy, into the freshness of a starlit night. And just as, on stepping into the open air, the splendours of mountain, sky, and sea may enlarge our feelings with wonder and delight, so a corresponding change may occur in our emotions towards one another; in this setting of a universe with which we feel ourselves now rapturously, now calmly, united, we love with less artifice, with greater impetuosity and self-abandonment. "Thomson and Cowper," says Peacock, "looked at the trees and hills which so many ingenious gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them, and the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of a new world." The Romantic poets tended to be absorbed in their trees and hills, but when they also looked in the same spirit on their own hearts, that operation added yet another world to poetry. In Shelley the absorption of the self in nature is carried to its furthest point. If the passion to which nature moved him is less deeply meditated than in Wordsworth and Coleridge, its exuberance is wilder; and in his best lyrics it is inseparably mingled with the passion which puts him among the world's two or three greatest writers of love-poems.